A Fake $20 Bill

At the 59th street subway station a lady helped me carry my busking equipment up the stairs. As we got to the top of the stairs the train was in the station. The lady ran to the train and as she got to it the train doors started to close. The lady forced the doors to open, and she made it into the train.

Closing train doors

Nobody was at the Music Under New York spot on the platform.
As the uptown train stopped I could see three Nortenos wearing mismatched hats playing guitars inside.

There was a train which didn’t stop at the station. It had a sign saying ‘Not in Service’.

'Not in Service' train

A guy said to me “I saw you on TV last night!”. Good to know they are still showing reruns of ‘Cool in Your Code’.

A kid made a point of showing me that he is putting a bill into my donations bucket. I immediately suspected something was up. Indeed, when I checked later, it turned out that he gave me a fake $20 bill. It looks real on one side, but has a blank, white paper on the other. When it’s folded it looks like a real bill.

The three Nortenos with the mismatched hats whom I saw playing in the train before waved to me from across the platform. They were making their way on the downtown trains now.

Nortenos

At 3pm an MTA uniformed employee put a sticker on both garbage cans. the sticker says ‘Can it for a Greener Planet’.

Garbage can

At 3:30 Fernando and a friend (they play in an Andean band in the subway) were on their way to the Bronx to have their amps fixed. They told me the amp repair man in the Bronx is better than the Chinese one. It seems all the subway musicians go to either one of these two repair men.

As I was waiting for the train to take me home I could hear an Andean flute playing the ABBA song ‘Chiquitita’.
I gave candy to the guy who often stands at the bottom of the stairs with an empty styrofoam coffee cup in his hand and a sign hanging around his neck saying ‘I’m Hungry’.

1 Comment

  1. Kev Brown on April 24, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    That kid with the fake $20 bill is a cheeky little monkey!